Richard Drizin

Old dogs can learn new tricks indeed

Best ASP.NET Shared Hosting provider

I’ve been using Arvixe for many years now. I believe they have lots of features, a good support, and a fair price.
However, recently Arvixe is getting worse every day. Servers are going down for no reason, sites stop working because of misconfigurations, and for a few times I couldn’t even upload a 5mb file because server had no available space.
Their support is also getting worse everyday, you’ll always have to wait at least 30 min to talk to someone.

Having said that, I made some research and tried a few different providers, and would like to give a short summary for each one:

Arvixe: Usually it’s very slow, specially the first load. Sometimes your site just stops working. Sometimes you change web.config and the error keeps happening as if you hadn’t changed anything. I guess they have some weird cache mechanism. For people who like one-click-installations, many of them simply don’t work. Despite of that, they have lots of features, you can run full trust, you can have multiple sites, multiple domains, and basically there’s nothing I couldn’t do in Arvixe.

HostGator: They don’t allow full trust. Consequently, you can’t run MVC 5, Owin (Social Login), and even NLog is a little limited in medium trust. Speed seemed to be fast, but no running MVC 5 nowadays is a blocker for me and probably for many others, so I didn’t even tested longer. Also, when they say “n sites per account”, please note that this is ONE site in the root, and other sites under that as virtual directories. When you have complex applications (like adding modules, handles, 3rd party components, etc), specially in the main site, this can be hell on earth, because the root site will (by default) cascade its configurations to child sites.

Host4ASP: The initial load is incredibly slow. I have an MVC 5 app which is basically a static site (in the sense that there’s no database, and nothing heavy running), and it can take from 30 seconds to 120 seconds to load. It’s a shame that during the trial period it was fine, and now I’ve signed up for a 1-year plan. Shame on me. Shame on them.

WinHost: I didn’t test, but they have a hard limit of 5GB per SQL database, and I need 10 to 15GB (not evey paying add-ons you can have more). Also, they are one of the few who allow you to have only 1 site per account.

GoDaddy: I used it many years ago, and it was very buggy, very slow, and the number of “buy this, buy that” is scary.

Bottom line: Arvixe is still the best ASP.NET hosting provider that I know. And trust me: I’m not being paid for this review (many comparison sites are being paid commissions).

PS: I have a very high-demanding site (15k daily users), and no shared hosting provider allows such a large demand, so I have this site on a dedicated server. Probably I’ll just move my low-demanding sites (about 5) to this dedicated hosting, since it’s easier to manage them all on a single place. Emails are hosted on free Gmail for Business (but if I were paying I would surely use Office 365 or some exchange-based email), and my DNS I’m moving all to Amazon, because it’s very difficult to manage DNS across 2 or 3 different registrars (I use different registrars because I have domains in different countries).